Websanova wModal jQuery Plugin

Posted on January 28, 2013 by websanova
Most of the jQuery modal plugins out there had either not enough options, or too many and weren’t too flexible either way. I wanted to create a modal system that was very flexible that came with some nice options out of the box and made it very easy to add customized prompts and effects of your own. I ended up creating wModal using jQuery and my own jQuery Plugin Development Boilerplate which is available on github for all your modal needs. Continue reading →
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Manually adding PHP Versions to WAMP

Posted on January 12, 2013 by websanova
Since WAMP is usually a little behind on it’s versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP we may sometimes need to install them manually. I find this not as big an issue with Apache or MySQL but typically prefer to have my PHP version as up to date as possible. Hence this little tutorial goes over the brief steps required to quickly update your PHP versions manually in wamp. Continue reading →
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Installing PHP oAuth on Windows

Posted on January 12, 2013 by websanova
I found a lot of confusion when trying to setup the PHP oAuth library on Windows. It seemed there was a lot of outdated information out there so I decided to write this little updated post on the subject.

I also noticed a lot of people having issues getting it to work with their wamp or xamp install (myself included) which required updating PHP to a version that was not yet packaged with the latest version of wamp or xamp available at the time. So, I also wrote this little post on Manually adding PHP Versions to WAMP.

It all only takes a few minutes and allows you to get up to date with all the latest and greatest goodies. Continue reading →
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Timezones, the Right Way

Posted on December 12, 2012 by websanova
This is a little article on how to deal with timezones when storing dates/times in your database. The database or language you choose to use really doesn’t matter as the concepts are universal but I will be giving examples using MySQL and PHP. Timezones are actually a very trivial concept but they seem to be overlooked and over complicated. Typically when you setup a database or are using some web hosting service there will be some default timezones set. This default is okay if you have one server, but what happens if you decided to move your server or have multiple servers in different locations? Continue reading →
Posted in MySQL, PHP | 1 Comment

Simple, Lighweight jQuery Pagination Plugin

Posted on November 18, 2012 by websanova
After some frustration trying some jQuery pagination plugins I found on Google, many of which were written using jQuery 1.3 or 1.4, I decided to write a new one as it seems one was needed. This pagination plugin is very lightweight and flexible and has ajax support allowing you to customize it for your own needs. It comes pretty standard out of the box with what you would expect. There are four basic parameters for setting total, index, limit and the url. Continue reading →
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jQuery .clear() – Clearing Element Contents Using a Timer

Posted on November 13, 2012 by websanova
This is a handy little method to have laying around. It allows you to populate an element and clear it after a certain amount of time. You simply provide a string as a message and optionally provide a delay and fadeOut duration for the element. The reason I wrote myself this little method is that simply using the jQuery delay method didn’t really produce the desired results as it did not allow resetting of the message in the element. Continue reading →
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jQuery .cssAll() – Retrieving Multiple CSS Properties

Posted on November 6, 2012 by websanova
The current implementation of the .css() method in jQuery allows us to set multiple properties to an element, but only allows us to pull one property at a time. This is a little function I wrote for myself as I found myself sometimes wanting to pull more than one CSS property from an element at a time to assign to one or more other elements. It returns an object that can then easily be passed into another element using the .css() method. Continue reading →
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How to Stay Relevant

Posted on November 4, 2012 by websanova
Staying relevant in the technology industry can be difficult, it seems there are so many new things to keep up with, let alone keeping up with the technologies you already know. I’ve seen too many developers simply learn skills, but not refine or improve them. You get caught up with trying to just produce as much code as you can and don’t think about producing more code in less time.

I always spent a lot of time working on side projects and would always make an effort to play with some new library or framework, however it always seemed like a never ending battle. So about a year ago I decided to try something new, I started spending 30 minutes a day reading up on something. Whether that was reading the jQuery docs, a book on advanced PHP topics or simply studying algorithms and object oriented design didn’t matter, the key was to spend 30 focused and uninterrupted minutes a day learning something new. Continue reading →
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JavaScript URL Parser

Posted on October 27, 2012 by websanova
This is a nice little library I wrote for myself as I found I was quite frequently parsing a url in my projects. I was constantly building little custom functions but decided to finally build out a nice simple and lightweight library to help parse url’s with. It comes in at only ~1.6 Kb minified and ~0.6Kb gzipped. You can find the latest version of the url() JavaScript URL parser on GitHub which contains a minified and jQuery version. Continue reading →
Posted in JavaScript | 1 Comment

10 Awesome jQuery Rating Plugins

Posted on October 27, 2012 by websanova
This is a collection of jQuery rating plugins a few pure CSS implementations at the bottom of the list. They range from large to small, some more fancy than others and some with additional options should you need them. You will definitely need to try out the demo pages to get the full affect for some of the plugins, like the “Colourful” plugin by Marcfolio. Anyway, here are the plugins. Continue reading →
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